BIG TENTS

When the 2016 presidential election campaign featured its first GOP debate with 15 candidates and two sessions because no stage was big enough to hold them all, you had to wonder “do all these people fit under one tent?”

Our political spectrum has outgrown the comfort of two party control and it shows in both the republican and the democratic election campaign. Most clearly on the GOP side, where only a few months ago the party bosses went out of their way to make Donald Trump declare his unfailing loyalty to the party and now find themselves openly toying with the idea to find an establishment representative to run a third party candidate in case Trump wins the GOP nomination. But also on the democratic side where Bernie Sanders represents such a far left position that the center and the  traditional liberal positions have to be covered by one and the same person, Hillary Clinton. Now, admittedly, she is eminently suited to play that role because she has proven that she can change color faster than a chameleon and she will say or do just about anything to get elected. In that sense she is a superb politician.

As we all know, crises are too precious a thing to waste. If anything good is to come out of this year’s messy and distressing election campaign, it may be the splintering, the shattering, of the republican and the democratic parties. The end of the antiquated two party system that has outlived its suitability and no longer reflects the reality on the ground. Going into the 2016 elections the number of voters registered as Independent is larger than the number of registered Democrats or Republicans. In fact, Independents may represent as much as 42% of the voters in 2016. If that is the case, how much sense does it make to ask all these people to make a choice between one candidate anointed by the Republican Party and another candidate anointed by the Democratic Party? If more than 40% of the voters does not want to be identified with, or committed to, one of the two traditional parties and wants to be free to base their vote on the merit of the person or the issue in front of them rather than on party affiliation, what sense does it make to try to put them back in the straightjacket of the two party system? Let’s face the facts, the toothpaste is out of the tube and there is no way to push it back in. The modern world is too complex to be captured in a simple duality that was devised centuries ago.

The only feature of our current political system that is more detrimental to good public governance than the existing two party system is the stranglehold of money in politics.

It may, therefore, turn out to be a blessing that we see the big tents collapsing under their own weight. There is no roof large and strong enough to shelter all the big egos of republicans as disparate as Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Paul Rand, Ben Carson and John Kasich (not to mention Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum or Chris Christie). The RNC has lost the capacity to build a platform that seriously addresses the needs of the nation and that all these so called republicans can subscribe to. It leaves the voters no choice but to let go of their party affiliation and go to the ballot box not to vote for the party and the program of their choice but for the candidate or person of their choice.

It is the incapacity of the RNC to articulate a conservative platform for the 21^st century that creatively and effectively deals with free and fair trade, with measures to reduce inequality and mitigate the effects thereof, with a humane and smart immigration policy, with tax and entitlement reform, with criminal justice reform, with reduction in the cost of healthcare and higher education and with the gradual slicing of the national debt, that has enabled a rogue, opportunistic and populist puppet like Donald Trump to steal the show.

If the Republican Party can’t offer constructive solutions for the future let’s see a new party (or parties) emerge that will offer the voting public a clear ideological and practical platform to move forward on.

On the democratic side the situation is not much different be it somewhat obscured by Elizabeth Warren’s decision to stay out of the melee and by the lack of traction that centrist democrats like Jim Webb and Martin O’Malley were able to get in a year where the party had long committed to give Hillary Clinton the opportunity that she was denied by the meteoric ascendance of Barack Obama in 2008.

Why is the republican establishment scrambling to find a white horse that can pull them away from the abyss (of their own making), that has suddenly opened up in front of them by the phenomenon of Donald Trump? Because they begin to realize that they have allowed the party to be gored at the center, to be eviscerated of the stable core of its constituency that has traditionally provided its flag bearer in national elections and that has, more often than not, placed a republican in the White House. What happens to the party influence in Congress and the State Capitols when the party of Lincoln now becomes the party of Trump (the brand identity elevated to the man’s highest ambition)? Where will the loyalties go of the republicans who were elected governor, State representative or State senator? Interesting and important questions. Here is my take: I think that we will be facing a reconstitution of the political landscape in the USA where the time for big tents will have come and gone. It may be tough for party loyalists to accept, but it may be just what the doctor ordered if we finally want to break gridlock in Washington DC caused by a stalemate between two archaic, retrogressive and polarized parties of our forebears.